How to Write About America

“What does it mean to call a story American?” Lee Ellis, a fiction editor at The New Yorker, asked Jennifer Egan, Yiyun Li, and Junot Díaz at the Director’s Guild Theatre yesterday evening. The authors grinned during a brief silence. “My mind leaps to ‘The Great Gatsby,’” Egan said. “It tells a story of a reinvention and a transformation. It captures a strong part of what I think of as American identity: You can be anyone that you want to be here, thought it doesn’t always work out.”

“To me it is a very American concept to get anything you want,” Chinese-born Li responded. Díaz chipped in: “What we think of as an American story is more about the fantasies we want to see rather than our histories.”

The authors discussed how they struggle with American identity in their own stories. “The experience of an immigrant is trying to get into the bubble,” Egan said. “The experience of an American child is being in the bubble without knowing it. We have to get out of the bubble and see how it is perceived by the rest of the world. That awareness is very central to my work.”

Li, positioning herself outside this bubble, sees America as a prodigious ocean teeming with fish. While she has learned to swim in this ocean, she fears that she will never become a fish herself. “I’ll just wave at the fish,” she muttered with a shy smile, “because they are pretty fish.”

Díaz, who emigrated from the Dominican Republic at a young age, initially felt pressured to assimilate to American culture: “I had to learn America from the ground up.” Now, he perceives America as multifaceted: “It is beyond counting how many simultaneous Americas exist. Your America might not correspond with somebody else’s and that is O.K.”